Glory of the Hero

I like getting achievements; they make me feel all warm and fuzzy inside. And I sure wouldn’t mind a flashy new proto-drake mount. A few weeks ago I started racking up achievements for Glory of the Hero and although I haven’t gotten many new ones lately, I did put together a list of all the achievements needed. I am about halfway through it and one of these days I’ll try to get a solid group together and knock out a whole bunch more.

Utgarde KeepOn the Rocks – This one is pretty basic; just ignore the ice tombs when they happen. Getting this one done right relies a lot on the healer being pro. As long as everyone is topped off, nobody will get insta-gibbed by the tomb. Bringing a ton of DPS helps because the faster the boss is dead, the fewer tombs you have to deal with. (Bringing a ton of dps and just plain brute forcing your way through things is going to be a pretty common theme)

NexusIntense Cold – Clearing the debuff is easy enough most of the time, you just keep jumping up and down like a fool. But, when the boss uses frost nova, you can’t clear the debuff with ease anymore. But, you can break the nova by intervening your healer or a ranged dps or by using a pvp trinket or a free action potion and depending on what class the healer is, they may be able to just dispel you. This is an individual achievement; you can get it even if other people in your group get more than 2 stacks.Split Personality – This one is pretty straight forward; it’s all about DPS control. I personally like my groups to focus fire them each to about 15% then aoe them down together. Try to keep the arcane mob silenced at the end or she might stun the group and/or polymorph someone at the last second and screw things up.Chaos Theory – We tried to brute force this one like On the Rocks and it wasn’t pretty. The next time we actually had a plan. We cleared all the trash near the platform where the boss was so that we had tons of room to move around. On the pull, I dragged the boss all the way to the far side of his platform while DPS put on the hurt. When he went immune, we all ran off of his platform so the group was out of range of the lightning and out of prox aggro range of the new spawns. When the phase ended, the boss and all the spawns come running towards the group who are on the next platform and the all get bottlenecked on the ramp between the platforms, perfect to grab all the adds with a tclap/shockwave while the DPS hit them with hard aoe. Once the adds were dealt with, DPS was back on the boss until the next rift phase and we all ran away again. Rinse and repeat.

Azjol’nerubWatch him Die – This is one of the harder achievements out there and I have yet to try it. There are two different strategies I could think of and neither of them is particularly appealing. My first idea would be to pull the first watcher group and kill the two adds but not the watcher himself and then repeat that with the next two watchers. Then, while tanking all three watchers, pull the boss, pop cooldowns and burn the hell out of him with a fair bit of prayer mixed in. My second idea would be to have the group’s healer grab aggro on all three packs and kite them all the way back to the beginning of the instance while the 3 dps and the tank pop all their CDs and burn the boss and pray that they can kill him before the watchers get back and/or the tank dies, If the mobs can be snared, an earthbind totem or frost trap or piercing howl will buy a few extra seconds. On wowhead, there is another, slightly more elegant strategy. I guess there is a path off to one of the side of the room where the healer can run up and get almost parallel with the boss. Then you have someone in the group create a big health deficit with life tap or getting naked and then getting dressed again. Then, the person with the health deficit has to very quickly get in combat, have them put up a dot, or a quick auto-attack the moment the tank charges in, then way, when the healer lands a big heal on that person, they will also be in combat and will have aggro on the adds. Nobody else touches the adds, it’s a full burn on the boss. The adds run all the way over to where the path up to the healer starts and then run up the path and just before they get to the healer, he jumps down so the adds have to come all the way back down again. Those strategies are about as elegant as a punch in the face, but if your DPS is high enough, you should have enough time to kill the boss. There might be a better way to get this achievement done, but I don’t know what it is.Hadronox Denied – I am not entirely sure what the correct strategy for this one is but I will tell you what happened when my group did it. But first, a quick review of the boss the encounter works. The boss starts off a level below the group and he is fighting other spiders for some reason. There are a few trash pulls in the room and there are two long stairways leading up to doors from which new adds spawn. The adds will go and attack Hadronox and he will put a poison on them and when he kills an add that is affected by the poison, he gets a huge heal. If you are doing this without the achievement, the boss will make his way up to the groups level, killing spiders all the way, and then put web over the doors so no more adds spawn so you don’t have to worry about the poison and the heals. What my group did when we went for the achievement was to attack the boss just to get on his aggro list so that when he got up to our level, he would immediately move to engage us instead of putting web on the doors and stopping the stream of spiders. That meant that we had to deal with the poison and the boss getting big heals when the spiders died. We didn’t really research how the encounter worked so it took us a few times of getting the boss to around 50-60% and then watching him heal to full before we figured out what was going on. Our strategy was a simple loldps approach. We waited for a bunch of spiders to die from the poison and then nuked the crap out of the boss before any other spiders could die and heal him. I don’t know if there is another more elegant way to get this achievement, but good ol’ fashioned brute force worked for my group.Gotta Go – This is the hardest one by a long shot. It requires certain class comp and a fair bit of luck. Its getting a much deserved nerf in the next patch. A lot of people who have gotten this achievement bring a tank, a dps class that can heal and 3 pure DPSers. The ideal group is a warrior tank, a rogue, a hunter, a shaman (preferably elemental) and another physical DPS class (preferably another hunter). The shaman throws a little bit of damage and makes sure the tank is topped off for the first 25% of the fight. When the boss gets close to 75%, the hunter drops a snake trap and the rogue makes sure that mind numbing poison is up. The rogues poison and the mind numbing poison that the snake trap applies stack. So you just hope and pray that the snakes put up the mind numbing poison. Then you wait for the boss to start casting either Locust Swarm or Pound and while he is casting, everyone pops cooldowns and burns harder than they have ever burned before. The idea is that during the slow cast of Pound/Locust Swarm, the group puts out a ton of damage so that when the cast finishes and the boss goes to burrow like he normally would at 75%, he is actually below 50% so that you are able to skip the 50% burrow entirely. You nuke the hell out of the adds and then, when you are getting close to the 25% burrow, you try to get mind numbing stacked with the snake poison again and take the boss from just over 25% to zero during another slow cast.

Ahn’kahetParty’s Over – Pretty simple, have someone sit out. That means you have less DPS to stop him from killing someone during his Vampiric Embrace thingy and fewer people to spread the damage from the fire orb between, but all in all, its not overly difficult.Volazj’s Quick Demise – You used to be able to use line of sight to avoid the Insanity cast, but when my group tried to do that last week, we failed repeatedly. Blizzard may have changed how the spell works so that you cannot LoS it anymore or my group might have just been bad at running around pillars. Either way, its possible to do this achievement without using LoS to skip the Insanity phase. The idea is the same as Gotta Go, but its much more forgiving. He casts Insanity at 66% and 33% and you will have to deal with at least 1 cast. So you dps him down, he casts the first Insanity and your group has to burn all the adds in their phase as fast as possible but without popping cooldowns. The Insanity phase is what will make or break your attempt and all 5 people have to perform well. Once you get out, you keep burning the boss but slow dps around 37% and wait for a Mind Flay. Curse of Tongues or Mind Numbing Poison or something else to slow the boss’ cast time needs to be applied and his Mind Flay cast will take forever. When he starts casting Mind Flay, the group pops all their cooldowns and nukes the hell out of the boss. Between the slow Mind Flay cast and the slow Insanity cast, the boss should die before the Insanity cast completes.Respect your elders – This one is pretty simple. The adds he summons put up an aura that make the boss immune to damage so in order to kill the boss without killing the adds, you have to make sure the boss never gets that aura and never goes immune. The summon is based on the boss’ hp so the way to do this is by clearing pretty much all the trash between the boss and the entrance to the instance and then kiting the boss all the way back to the entrance. The first summon is at 80% so you dps the boss to there and then pop cooldowns and nuke the hell out of him and get the kill before the add gets in range to apply the aura.Volunteer Work – For some achievements, you can ignore some mechanic of the fight and brute force your way through it, but for this one you are required to ignore a mechanic and brute force your way though it. Luckily though, it’s not too difficult. You just let the add get to her and let her enrage and then just tank right through it. You can cheese the encounter by jumping down the waterfall after you first pull the boss so that by the time she gets to you the enrage has worn off, but that kinda feels like cheating to me. When my group did this, I ran to one of the corners of the platform so she had to waste some enrage time by running over to me and when she got there, I immediately disarmed her and popped a cooldown as the disarm was wearing off. By doing that, I was never really in danger of dying. The only hitch is her whirlwind attack which will absolutely one-shot any melee that doesn’t run away when she starts to cast it.

Drak’tharon KeepConsumption Junction – This one is pretty easy. Tank the boss at the bottom of the stairs and have the group hang out at the top of the stairs next to a pillar. The group up top kills the adds immediately so that they can’t contribute to the Consume count. The timer for Consume is pretty regular so the group simply runs out of line of sight every 10 seconds so that the tank is the only person it hits. This is obviously going to be more difficult if you have a melee heavy group, but still totally doable. You just burn for 10 seconds, run out of line of sight until you see the boss get another stack of Consume from the tank and then run back in and pewpewpew for another 10 seconds.Better off Dred – The strategy is pretty basic, pull everything and kill it all. There are 7 raptors in the boss’ room so you can kill one of them before the pull. If you screw it up and kill more than one, don’t worry, they respawn fairly quickly. One strategy is to pull the front 3 raptors and get them all to around 10-15% then pull the boss and finish off the raptors and then pull the others 1 at a time. Or you can be pro and pull everything at once and zerg it down.Oh Novos – Really simple, just kill everything while it is still on the stairs. The humanoids that spawn from the sides don’t count against you, only the undead guys and they only come down the stairs.

Violet HoldDefenseless – Very simple – be pro.Lockdown – Run VH a lot and hope RNG is on your side.Dehydration – This one requires a bit of group coordination. The easiest way to do it is by using the Defense Control Crystals in the room (which means that you can’t get this and Defenseless in the same run). Designate someone in the group to click the crystal and have the person click the crystal just before the split happens. The crystal takes 6 seconds to fire which is why you want to click it a little bit before the split happens. If any globules get close to the boss, you can stun them to keep them in place until the crystal fires.A Void Dance – Anyone care to guess what the strategy for this one is? That’s right, brute force. Ignore the adds and burn the boss as fast as possible

GundrakShare the Love – This achievement sucks and I hate it. You need a group with 2 tanks in it to get this done because the boss will never impale the tank. DPS the boss down to around 20% then stop dps until all 4 people have been impaled then have the second tank taunt and wait for the first tank to get impaled and then finish off the boss. You can try to improve your chances of getting the right people impaled by letting people die after they have gotten it, but in my experience, that can make the achievement bug out. There are other strategies involving having some people stay out of combat or other such silliness, but I the most reliable way to get this done and not have it bug out is to bring 2 tanks and wait for RNG to swing in your direction.Less-rabi – This achievement sucks and I hate it. The cast time for the transformation is based on the boss’ hp – the lower his hp, the faster the cast and he is immune to cast slowing effects like Curse of Tongues and Mind Numbing Poison. The cast has about a 10 second cooldown though. The idea is to dps him down to around 35% and wait for him to cast the transform. The cast will be very quick at that point so hitting the interrupt will require a good latency and a bit of luck. Once that cast happens, you need to pop cooldowns and burn as hard as possible to get him dead before he can cast again. Once he is below 15% or so, the cast will be nearly instant so interrupting it will require pure blind luck. 35% hp is about the lowest you can take the boss and still be reasonably able to get the interrupt off and then nuke him to 0 before he casts again. If your DPS is slow, you can try to set up the last interrupt before the burn at a lower %, but it will be very tough.

Halls of StoneGood Grief – Nothing too complicated about this one, burn the boss hard. The boss works just like Maiden of Virtue from Karazhan – the stun is broken by damage. Have everyone in the party ready to step into the void zone the moment before the stun lands so that it breaks quickly and dps can resume.Brann Spankin New – Very simple – be pro. If you can beat this encounter, you can get the achievement. Contrary to popular belief, this encounter does not rely on the tank’s ability to pick up the adds, it all comes down to how quickly the dps can kill the adds.Abuse the Ooze –Sjonnir only summons oozes between 50 and 20%, so get him to that range and sit on him. There are oozes that spawn and then they turn into Iron Sludges, make sure you are killing the right thing when they reach the boss or when they combine with each other (I don’t really remember exactly how they work) so make sure you are killing the right thing. They do an aoe poison volley that will do a ton of damage but they don’t have much HP, so make sure they get nuked quickly.

Halls of LightningLightning Struck – I got this achievement by accident the first time I did the instance; I didn’t realize the buff would go away. The strategy is the same for this achievement as it would be for the regular version of the boss. Kill the adds, then kill the boss. Just be prepared to get slapped around pretty hard because of the 30% damage buff.Shatter Resistant – I honestly don’t know how to not get this achievement. As long as you have 3 dpsers who have at least 35% brain function, you should have no trouble getting this done. Ignore the adds, burn the boss.Timely Death – This was another achievement that I got by accident the first time I was in the instance. Loken is hard and kills a lot of people, so burning him as hard as possible just makes sense – kill him before he kills you. Depending on what classes you have and their HP, it may be possible to just stay in for the lightning nova and eat the damage in order to keep DPS high.

StratholmeThe Culling of Time – Two words: chain pull. This is pretty easy to do as long as everyone in the group knows what it takes. It also helps to know where to go when you see the town crier guy yell where the next wave is. Get loot done very quickly; communicate how you want to handle it in advance to the group so that you don’t have to waste time during the event. And talk to Arthas ASAP every time he appears because he is slow as hell and takes forever with his RP nonsense. Keep in mind, pulling the boss within the timer doesn’t cut it, you have to kill him within the timer and if the timer expires while you are fighting the boss, he will despawn.Zombiefest – There are exactly 100 zombies in the gauntlet before the Mal’ganis. If you try to pull the entire gauntlet with all the elites mixed in, you will probably die horribly unless you are geared to the teeth. There are exactly 85 zombies in the streets in the beginning part of the instance and they will not respawn after the second boss dies. The most common strategy is to drag the second boss all the way to the inn where the third boss spawns and kill him slowly so that any zombies you had to kill while kiting the boss have enough time to respawn. Then you kill the third boss and get Arthas to open the back door so you have access to the gauntlet. Then you send someone with to go round up all the zombies in the instance. Ret aura, thorns, fire shield and damage shield will all kill the zombies and that’s bad. The person run all the way to the beginning of the instance and grab every single mob and then kites them all back to the inn, through the inn and out the other side to the beginning of the gauntlet. Then you can aoe all those 85 zombies from the beginning of the instance and pull the first few groups of zombies from the gauntlet to get your achievement.

Utgarde PinnacleThe Incredible Hulk – Pretty simple strategy, pull the boss and let her start he speech, then go grab the abom that is hanging out in the back of the room. DPS the abom down to around 10% hp because the sword sacrifice thingy only does about 10k damage. When she sacrifices someone, kill the 3 channelers like usual and then drag the abom under the sword. You can try some fanciness of sticking the abom up there and then running away so you don’t accidentally take sacrifice damage too, but that is just making it too complicated IMO. You are a tank, you can take the damage. If you are really worried, hit shield wall or last stand.
2x skadi http://www.wowhead.com/?achievement=1873 and http://www.wowhead.com/?achievement=2156 – Both of the Skadi achievements are done the same way and you can/should get them both at the same time. Go through the gauntlet once but do not fire any harpoons. Kill 5 harpooners and have each person in the group loot a harpoon. Then have everyone run back to the beginning of the gauntlet and out of the room and the encounter will reset but the harpoons don’t despawn. After the reset, do the gauntlet like you normally would but when Skadi comes into harpoon range, have all 5 people fire a harpoon at him at the same time and that ought to be enough to bring him down. After that, the fight is no different than normal.King’s Bane – Pretty simple, be pro. Don’t dps when the boss puts up Bane. Although, honestly, in all the times I have run this instance I have never ever seen him cast Bane. I don’t know if it is buggy or if the group’s dps has just been really good every time.

The OculusExperienced Drake Rider – Pretty straightforward, will require at least a couple runs to get it done.Ruby Void and Amber Void – 5x emerald drake kite fest. Roll stacks of poison and don’t ever stop moving, even when he does his portal thingy. The boss will keep up with you and the poison will heal through his damage, the key is that the whelps can’t keep up. If the current target of the boss starts to dip low, 1 or 2 people can cast the long channeled heal, but get moving quickly again, probably don’t need the full duration. This is, in my opinion, much easier than doing it with a normal setup, it just takes a while. I think it took roughly 7 minutes when my group did it.Emerald void – My group went with 5 bronze drakes. As has been the theme for most of the strategies, you are going to want to burn the boss done as fast as possible but this one requires a lot more strategy and coordination than most of the other ‘lol zerg’ strategies for other achievements. Its important to understand how the bronze drakes work. Maxing dps from a bronze drake is all about shock charges. The shock lance ability does about 5k damage plus another 6k damage for each shock charge that detonates. Temporal rift increases damage taken by the boss by 100% and while he is affected by it, shock charges are generated for every 15k damage taken. Stop time freezes everything for 10 seconds generates 5 shock charges. Open the fight by having 1 person use time stop and then immediately start channeling temporal rift. Once the rift is up, everyone else fires their shock lance for a ton of damage and the person channeling the temporal rift will get 10 shock charges very very quickly. Once that person gets 10 charges, the other four people channel temporal rift and the other person stops channeling his and fires off a shock lance. That shock lance plus the 10 charges should be enough damage that the other 4 people have 10 charges almost immediately and then you switch again and the 1 person channels the rift while the other 4 shock lance. By switching back and forth like that, you do a truckload of damage to the boss in a very short period of time. If executed perfectly, you will have people switching from shock lance to temporal rift every GCD. But that’s a pretty tall order so play it safe and channel the temporal rift for at least 2 seconds to make sure you get your full stack of shock charges. If done right, the boss will be almost to 66% within the duration of the first time stop and he will banish himself and cast his orb thingy without summoning any whelps at all. Have the group try to move in the same direction away from the orbs and wait for the boss to come to them afterward. Then another person will time stop and you repeat the temporal rift -> shock lance rotation again until he banishes a second time. If it gets sloppy and a bunch of whelps spawn, have another person use time stop to lock them down. You don’t want to use time stop too often though because it is subject to diminishing returns and you do not want to the boss to be immune if it gets ugly and you need a time stop while he is enraged. It will probably take a few repetitions to get the coordination for the rift -> shock lance rotation worked out but once you get rolling, you will be amazed by how fast the boss dies.Make it Count – If you have a group that knows how to do the 5 bronze drake method to kill the last boss, that is probably your best bet when going for this achievement because it will result in the fastest kill. Beyond that, just haul ass through the instance and pull as few drakes as possible when clearing for the second boss.

“Watch Him Die” is simple with a pala tank, he runs in and does aoe aggro on all the minibosses at the same time then runs like a bitch to the entrance while the rest of the group takes on the boss. The thing is – the boss does very little damage, i tanked him in berserker stance and he did 6k dmg per hit wich any healer easily can handle. When the adds reach the paladin at the entrance he bubbles and the adds will then run down again towards the rest of the group, when they are almost there he removes bubble and the will reach him again, by that time boss should be dead if not he just wait for low HP and uses LoH, should be plenty of time for any grp, all you need is a pally tank :)

We did the Watch Him Die achievement this evening, at it was brutal.
Line up:
Myself (Protection Warrior)
BM Hunter
Elemental Shaman
Demo lock
Holy priest

We first started with the kite tactic and failed a few times there. The mobs would stick to the puller (the hunter) but after a while they would come back to the rest of the group and eat up the healer.
We then tried the “pull one group, nuke the small adds, keep the big one alive, pull the next group” tactic. It doesn’t work. The damage on the tank is too brutal. The left most add constantly made me into a cocoon while we were dealing with the second group, and while we were trying to deal with that a skirmisher locked on to the holy priest and chew him up while ignoring my taunt.

So, we returned to the kite tactic.

The pull was quite complex and specific to our group, however the basic idea should remain the same:

The elemental shaman fired a lightning bolt at the left most group, and immediately following the cast, he shot a chain lightning at the right most group. In the meantime, the hunter MD’d him and hit the center group. What this means is that the shaman had proper aggro (not just the mobs attention because he was seen first) so the mobs would not come back immediately. We figured since he can only shoot one CL and that goes to the right most group, the lighting bolt should go to the wather in the left group. The holy pries then shackled the skirmisher since we deemed him a larger threat than the caster spider.

The pull went flawlessly (heroism was lit immediately following the CL pull), however the shaman died a little bit too soon and the adds started coming back while the boss still had 50%. All the adds were swarming back in and I mass taunted them and popped shield wall and last stand and prayed hard that DPS would down the boss before everyone died. The shaman ankhed and joined the fun as well. At the end only one DPSer survived and the boss was dead.

Definitely not an easy achievement.

The key is to have someone draw proper aggro (read: do damage or be MD’edd or whatever) and try to get the watchers and the adds as far away from the boss as possible. The boss really needs to die as fast as possible because eventually the kiter will die.

A good choice for pulling would also be a paladin of some sort because he/she could cast bubble on himself/herself right before being overwhelmed, therefore sparing a life. I don’t know if a paladin regains the original aggro once bubble goes away; if it stays, then the paladin should go towards the entrance of the instance and stay there; if it goes away completely, bubble and then return to the group to help out.

Pally healer with righteous fury on and a frost trap. Tank removes gear to get a hp deficit – runs in and paladin holy shocks him and gets off a heal. the paladin then runs for his life relying on the hunters trap to slow them enough. Rather simple once we tried it this way.

Also Make it count. This is very painful I’d advise just getting 5 people who know the fight well and doing it with a balance of drakes – 5 amber is too luck based and can go awry if someone misses a shock or a time stop.

Also only using emerald drakes doesnt work any more – the whelps have an ability which works regardless of LoS or distance after a couple mins.

As a pally tank for Watch Him Die we just pulled the watchers one by one and had the dps pick off the adds then moved on to the others. Once I had all the watchers on me I just tanked the boss, no one died.